Nanotechnology General News

(Nanowerk News) Netronome, the leading developer of flow processors, today announced an extension of its strategic relationship with Intel Corp. in which Netronome's next-generation flow processors will be manufactured on Intel's leading 22nm process. Netronome will offer the world's first flow processors based on Intel's market-defining 3-D Tri-Gate transistor technology and will shatter system benchmarks for flow processor performance, power and cost in network and security applications.

"Access to the Intel Custom Foundry is a key differentiator for Netronome and enables them to take advantage of the industry-leading performance and power efficiency of Intel's 22nm 3-D Tri-Gate technology," said Linley Gwennap, principal analyst at The Linley Group.

The agreement with Intel provides substantial benefits in several key areas to Netronome and its customers for market-leading flow processors:

Leading design and manufacturing practices: A tightly-coupled, joint development and manufacturing engagement model enables Netronome to take full advantage of Intel tools, processes, and proprietary modeling capabilities, thereby reducing development costs and time to market, while increasing product functionality.

"Intel's 3-D Tri-Gate transistor technology and 22nm manufacturing process provides significant benefits over legacy planar designs," said Jim Finnegan, senior vice president of engineering at Netronome. "As a result, our next generation flow processors will be several generations ahead of other communications processors, allowing Netronome to deliver up to 10-times the performance with more than triple the energy efficiency."

"Intel is delighted to provide Netronome with access to its leading edge 3-D Tri-Gate 22nm technology and integrated supply chain," said Sunit Rikhi, vice president of the Technology and Manufacturing Group at Intel. "While working with Netronome during the product design cycle to co-optimize its flow processors and our foundry offerings, it was clear that Intel's 22nm silicon technology and design infrastructure are a significant value-fit with Netronome's products."

Netronome's flow processors (NFP) bring breakthrough performance to a broad range of demanding network, security and content processing applications used in high end networks with speeds up to 100Gbps. NFPs simultaneously deliver packet processing with deep packet inspection, security processing, and I/O virtualization for millions of simultaneous stateful flows. NFPs are the industry's only processor specifically designed for tight coupling with Intel Architecture (IA) processors, complementing and strengthening the growing success of IA in networking, communications, and security applications.

Netronome's current generation of flow processors began with a technology license agreement with Intel in November 2007, reaching volume-shipments in 2011. Netronome's next-generation of processors based on Intel's 22nm process and 3-D Tri-Gate transistors will sample in 2013.

About Netronome

Netronome is a fabless semiconductor company and leader in flow processing. Netronome's solutions include flow processing silicon, software, tools and acceleration platforms that scale from 1 to 200 Gbps. They are used by networking equipment OEMs worldwide in carrier-grade and enterprise-class communications products that require deep packet inspection, flow analysis, content processing, virtualization and security. Netronome's flow processors are supported by comprehensive tools and a broad ecosystem of premier partners. Netronome's products are developed in labs in Santa Clara, CA, Boxborough, MA and Pittsburgh, PA. For more information on Netronome's products and technology, visit www.netronome.com.